like
cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there a
patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.

My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center of
the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a
vein of jetty lignite.

It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now
three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that
was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded;
spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges--

Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss,
striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.

We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a
split rampart of infinite space.

I looked behind--scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host
trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far
in front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing
into blackest night.

Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence.
It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent's
tongue--held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its
velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.

I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my
fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and
upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I
closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.

The Thing on which we rode lifted.

We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were
upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through
the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale
light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of
the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span,
on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.

We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult,
a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with
tremendous strokes of sound.

Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of
dawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed
indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just
touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness,